I\u27ll Be Busy All Next Week

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Australian indigenous children with low cognitive ability:family and cultural participation

Family and cultural inclusion are essential for the healthy development of young Australian Indigenous peoples with low cognitive ability. To date, this issue has received limited research attention. A secondary analysis of data collected in Wave 4 of Footprints in Time, Australia’s Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children, was conducted to help address this research gap. The study results indicated that in some areas, Indigenous children with low cognitive ability are at a higher risk of social exclusion than their peers. We discuss the policy implications of these findings with regards to addressing Indigenous disadvantag

Intersecting indigeneity, colonialisation and disability

This special issue sought to open a space for critical debates and reflections on the issues and challenges of bringing together Indigeneity and disability as an intersecting identity. The overall aim was to question and challenge existing approaches to modern Western understandings of disability, how it is regulated, governed and experienced once the cultural identity of being Indigenous is positioned at the fore. As editors of this special edition, we were conscious of our own cultural identities, Karen being first generation Australian of Southern European descent, and John being of the Yuin Nation of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. We engaged our own sense of the possibilities of examining the critical importance of alliances between non-Indigenous and Indigenous researchers working together as a partnership at a time when Australia’s political environment had largely ignored Indigenous and non-Indigenous efforts to further Indigenous claims for national constitutional recognition. Unlike other white settler societies such as Canada, USA and New Zealand, Australia has never had a formal Treaty explicitly recognizing Indigenous Australia as the original owners, nor are Indigenous peoples recognized within our main constitutional instrument, despite more recent combined advocacy for this very realization. Thus, the struggles for Indigenous recognition and rights to culture, kin, and country remain highly contested within the white settler colonial nation of Australia. This political backdrop spurred our interest to bring together researchers, practitioners, and activists who work at the edges of disability and Indigenous practice. We wanted researchers who understand the politics of reconciliation but also the longstanding issues that underpin such politics. This is reflected in the gamut of theoretical positioning and empirical explications that engage with situated local knowledges, spaces and places, alongside the intensive structural political and institutional negotiations of sovereignty, settler colonial nation-state power and its everyday embodied negotiations for First Peoples living with disability. This broad scoping of the special edition henceforth, hopes to reconcile the divergent global representations that are occurring within specific historical, political and geographic contexts, without the privileging or dominance of a particular standpoint

Decolonising the dynamics of media power and media representation between 1830 and 1930: Australian Indigenous peoples with disability

Indigenous Australians have experienced the horrific consequences of European invasion and colonisation. Some of these consequences include wars, geographic displacement and attempted genocide. Both the high prevalence and experience of disability among Indigenous peoples remain directly linked to the events that followed European invasion. Critical Disability Studies and Media Studies can investigate the process of decolonisation. This chapter is cross disciplinary in so far as we are concerned with the representation of Indigenous people in the mass media and decolonising Indigenous disability. We examine data collected from an analysis of the print media during the colonial period; that is, representation of “disabled” Indigenous people in mainstream newspapers during the first 100 years of the press from 1830. We use Martin Nakata’s Indigenous Standpoint Theory and Decolonising frameworks to deconstruct and analyse the material collected

Results of Dynamic Testing on Friction H-piles

A case history on the design and installation of pile foundations for support two taxiway bridges at the MidAmerica Airport is presented. The pile foundations included the use of heavy HP steel piles designed as friction piles embedded in a stiff clayey silt till. Typical pile foundations in the area consist of H-piles or closed-ended pipe piles driven to bedrock. The use of slightly shorter friction piles allowed substantial savings due to the large number of piles required to support the heavily-loaded bridges. An extensive dynamic testing program was performed to measure allowable pile capacities and soil setup. The taxiway was constructed across a wetlands area with soft, compressible soils where embankment loads caused up to 1-1/2 feet of settlement and negative skin friction on the piles. Longer piles with the same cross sectional area were used to offset the negative skin friction

Using a Model of Economic Solvency to Understand the Connection between Economic Factors and Intimate Partner Violence

Poverty is a risk factor for intimate partner violence (IPV); however, little is known about the economic state at which women are no longer at risk for IPV due to their economic status, which is economic solvency. A Model of Economic Solvency in women has been developed from the literature that includes four factors: human capital, social capital, sustainable employment, and independence. The purpose of this research is to validate the model in a sample of women reporting IPV. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to test the model using data from 280 abused women. Examination of the model yielded adequate fit with the data, indicating that the model is valid for use with women reporting IPV. The validation of the model offers strength of association between constructs and can be used to plan interventions to improve economic solvency in abused women to potentially reduce violence and facilitate recovery

The role of local, distal, and global information in latent spatial learning

In 4 experiments that investigated latent spatial learning, rats were repeatedly placed on a submerged platform in a corner of a square swimming pool with walls of different brightness. When they were subsequently released into the pool for a test trial in the absence of the platform, they spent the majority of time in the corner used for placement training—the correct corner. This effect was observed in Experiment 1, even when the test trial took place in a transformed version of the training arena. Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that the correct corner was identified by local cues based on the walls creating the corner. Experiment 4 demonstrated that distal cues created by the two walls that did not surround the platform during placement training could also be used to identify the correct corner. There was no evidence of learning about the relationship between global cues provided by the entire arena and the goal. The absence of the opportunity to develop instrumental, stimulus–response associations during placement training indicates that stimulus–stimulus associations acquired during this training were sufficient to guide rats to the platform when they were eventually released into the pool

Wangkiny Yirra “Speaking Up” project: First Nations women and children with disability and their experiences of family and domestic violence

First Nations women and children with disability are at greater risk of family and domestic violence (FDV) and its consequences than their non-Indigenous peers. A recent report (Ringland et al., 2022) found that First Nations women with disability had the highest rates of victimisation of any group, with 34.4% recorded as being victims of crime. Despite this, the voices of First Nations people are largely missing from disability research in Australia (Dew et al., 2019). The purpose of this research was to engage with First Nations women and children and key stakeholders in Western Australia to: gain an understanding of their experiences of FDV, identify factors they believe open them up to the risk of harm, document their observations and experiences of barriers and/or enablers to seeking assistance and support, obtain their views on what works in currently available programs, and make recommendations for future culturally safe prevention and protection programs. Key findings: Research focus on experiences of FDV of First Nations women and children with disability appears to be growing, but is still limited within the broader body of research focused on First Nations women and children and FDV. First Nations people, wherever located, are significantly more likely than non-Indigenous people to be confronted with a range of barriers to service access, diagnosis and service delivery. Current strategies for prevention and support for First Nations women and children involved with the justice and child protection systems are demonstrably inadequate and harmful and must be reformed